Paris: With Pen and Pencil eBook

Lamartine went to Naples and his purse ran low, when
he chanced to meet an old classmate who had plenty
of money, and together the young men enjoyed their
good fortune. At Naples, Graziella, the daughter
of a poor fisherman, fell in love with the poet.
The story of this girl he tells very touchingly.
When he returned home he was welcomed very warmly.
The family had removed to Macon. His mother grew
pale and trembling, to see how long absence and agony
of heart had changed her son. She told him that
their fortune had been considerably affected by his
travels and imprudences, and she spoke not by way
of reproach, for said she, “You know that if
I could change my tears into gold, I would gladly give
them all into your hands.”

He wished to go to Paris, and his father gave him,
for his maintenance, the moderate sum of twelve hundred
francs a year. The mother pitied her son, and
going to her room, she took her last jewel and put
it into his hands, saying, “Go and seek glory!”
He took a plenty of recommendations with him, but
was resolved to accept nothing from the emperor.
When a young man he had dreamed of a republic, but
now, after coming to Paris, he became a Bonapartist.
He entered the most aristocratic circles, and changed
again to a legitimist. He now made a second voyage
to Italy, following the inclinations of his dreamy
nature. During his stay there, he composed the
first volume of his Meditations, which afterward
won him so much fame.

He was on the borders of the gulf of Naples, when
he heard of the establishment of the Bourbon dynasty,
and he hastened home and solicited a place in the
army, to the great joy of his father. During the
Hundred Days he threw aside the sword, and would not
take it again when Louis XVIII. regained the throne.

Lamartine now loved a young woman devotedly, but she
died, to his excessive grief. He was severely
ill from this cause, and it wrought a great change
in his character. When recovered from his illness,
he destroyed his profane poetry, and kept only that
which bore the impress of faith and religion.
He published his first volume of Meditations
in 1820. He sought in vain two years for a publisher,
until at last a man by the name of Nicoll, as a personal
favor, issued the volume. It made his fortune.
France welcomed the new poet as a redeemer, who had
dispelled the materialism of Voltaire. He became
an attache of the ambassador in Tuscany, and
there met a young English woman, who was in love with
him before she saw him, from reading his Meditations.
This woman he shortly married. She brought him
beauty, goodness, and a large fortune.